The work of Brussels-based Belgian artists Jos De Gruyter (b. 1965) and Harald Thys (b. 1966) stages a parallel world fraught with social discomfort, psychological tension, human unease and general strangeness. The artists are in the habit of distilling fictions out of a reality that is, sometimes, ‘too real’. Both willingly concede that they feel attracted to the psychotic state of contemporary societies, a state that they simultaneously dread and disseminate in their work. Without ever falling into cynicism or moralism, the artists deftly and wittily transform that which resembles fear or a latent state into something willed, critical and counter to the status quo.

The deflated characters in their works always seem to be ‘post-’ something: post-trauma, post-language, post-human, etc. In CAPUT (CAPITA) (2018), eight such characters – all portraits of actors featured in their videos – are presented with surreal black humour on plinths reminiscent of a Roman gallery of busts honouring elegantly the glory of the past. Thanks to the playful irony, the viewer is able to endure the characters’ morbid biographies. Notwithstanding their crude features, these characters seem familiar, as if we already knew them; they are, in their own way, archetypes that remind us that this is as much about us as it is about them.